AI Overviews
Now take your search topic and craft a prompt for a general AI research tool to outline your question and find relevant sources in the field. Choose a few AI tools to test your prompt and compare the results.
To use U of I resources start with:
VandalChat vs Microsoft Copilot vs ??
Using the approaches to avoid biases, try modifying your prompt with different phrasing and directions. Try modifying the models and thinking levels
- How do the AI assistants compare?
- What next steps do the assistants suggest?
- Does changing the tone of the prompt or wording of instructions impact the outputs?
- Can you tell the difference between models and levels?
- Are the academic articles up to date?
- Are the academic articles suggested similar to the results found in the database searches?
Keep in mind your prompt–like any research question–is an iterative process. Research questions evolve with new information and scholarship rarely has definite answers. Ask deeper questions to develop additional questions or lines of inquiry into your topic.
Lateral Verification
Choose some of the citations generated by your AI summaries and verify them in our traditional databases.
- How easy does the tool make it to check citations (e.g. direct links, footnotes, or simple text)?
- Are the citations real?
- Does the content match the claims in the summary?
- Ask the model about its own blind spots (e.g., prompting the AI with “What perspectives, methodologies, or data might be excluded from this summary?”).